A Thread through Chaos

by Jean Roberta

My stepson is convinced that his mom and I are hoarders. He wants us to get our house, and our lives, into better shape. His – um – almost-girlfriend? friend-with-benefits? hires herself out to declutter other people’s space. This seems to be a trendy occupation because “hoarding” (formerly a condition without a name) has been identified in the mass media.

The two of them came to visit us, and I gave Ms. Declutter a tour of our house, not hiding anything. I opened closet doors, and described what couldn’t be seen (because it was buried under something else.) She was diplomatic, and said she would come help me organize stuff as soon as I’m ready.

At the risk of sounding defensive, I have damn well sorted out and discarded a lot of stuff. The problem is that more stuff comes into the house, and needs to be sorted. We have an old toilet in our basement, a souvenir of our renovations. It’s still there because the Re-Store (which claims to accept every stick of used furniture or old appliance ) wouldn’t accept it. We have a huge plastic crate full of Christmas ornaments, plus two fake trees that don’t fit in the crate. We have my world-class collection of wrapping paper, ribbon, and gift bags.

Back up in the civilized environment of our front room, Stepson continued introducing Ms. Declutter to our family stories, including that of my grown daughter, who hardly seems like a stepsister to my stepson any more. She stopped speaking to me and everyone connected with me in the summer of 2010, so I have not had contact with her, her husband, or their two children since then. When anyone asks me whether I have grandchildren, I’m not sure what to say. I have passed on my DNA in much the same way that a sister of King Richard III passed on her DNA through 17 generations to a man currently living in Canada whose blood enabled the dead king’s bones to be identified. I don’t have grandchildren in any meaningful way.

You must be wondering where I’m going with this. It occurred to me, as Stepson explained to Ms. Declutter why my daughter feels that none of us (especially her mom, the unworthy vessel that bore her) are good enough to be in her life, that we all crave a degree of logic and coherence. This is our weakness. We want to find a path through the immense clutter of our lives.

Realistically, everyone’s life consists of millions and billions of individual moments. Some experiences are brutal, some are funny, some are heartwarming, some are frustrating, some are boring, some are terrifying, some drive us to ecstasy. Our expectations are thwarted, but then life sometimes gives us something better, and worse. We do well-intentioned things that don’t work. We say things we wish we could take back. We form one-sided crushes that never go anywhere. We form mutual relationships that change and shift until we forget what attracted us to that person in the first place.

We turn our lives into meaningful narratives by emphasizing certain things and editing out the rest. Sometimes our stories clash with the stories of other people who have brushed up against us. I believe this is why my daughter feels she can’t afford to let me into her life, or let me interact with anyone who has heard her current version. She can’t afford to run the risk that her story about the mother who was “never there” for her (her phrase) might be challenged by me, or doubted by others.

In the 1970s, my daughter’s father told himself (and me) a story about a disloyal wife, a nympho slut from hell, a typical North American white woman who was constantly picking up random men to humiliate her decent African husband. This story literally seemed to drive him insane, but he couldn’t let go of it. After I left him, I realized that his story about our relationship would never mesh with mine because giving up his story would cost him too much. He would have to reconstruct his conception of reality, and of himself.

For years afterward, I had to pry myself loose from friends and acquaintances who advised me to go back to my husband to “resolve” our credibility gap. They were telling themselves the story that all relationships can be healed if people just talk to each other. They obviously had a high opinion of themselves for believing in love and reconciliation.

Two days ago, an elderly pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses came to my door. I’m sure they were telling themselves the story that if they just planted a seed of faith in my heart, it would grow. They probably thought I really needed the good news they had come to tell me. Telling them to frack off and leave me alone probably would have encouraged them to believe that Satan has a grip on me. I accepted their pamphlet and said I was very busy, then shut the door as soon as I could. It seemed like the only way to keep them out of my space that would make any sense to them.

Years ago, I dreamed about having a conversation with a stallion who could speak English. (He had learned by listening to his human handlers.) He told me that some of his friends had told him all about human mares, and how they are in heat all the time. He looked sideways at me (the only way he could look) to see how I was reacting to this piece of barnyard lore.

In the dream, I laughed and told him that wasn’t true.

The horse told me he knew that. After all, he explained, he was neither a fool nor a foal. He asked if it’s true that human females go into heat for five days once in every moon-cycle of 28 days. I said not exactly.

“Oh, I get it,” said my horsey date. “It doesn’t come that often, but it lasts longer, doesn’t it?”

I realized I would have to say something that would seem logical to him. “It’s not my time,” I said.

“Oh,” answered the horse, sounding disappointed. But at least we had communicated, however awkwardly. I could only imagine how he would relay this conversation to another stallion, one of his buddies.

I sometimes wonder how I might be deceiving myself with my own stories about my experience. I probably won’t get a clear answer to that in this life.
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Weakness Is the Mother of Invention

Sacchi Green

What do you do when you have to come down out of the trees because the climate has changed and the trees become scarce and now you’re living in a savannah environment where the grasses are tall and most other creatures, both those that want to catch and eat you and those you want to catch and eat, can run faster than you can?

Right away I’ll back off my choice of title and admit that evolving to stand erect so that you can see farther across the savannah is a form of survival of the fittest that has nothing to do with invention. But consider what happens when you can see the prey or the predator from far away, but the predator is stronger and has bigger teeth and claws than you do, and the prey is still too fast to catch easily. How do you compensate for your weaknesses?

You invent weapons for protection, and for hunting. You figure out how to use fire to scare the sabre-tooth tiger away from your cave, and incidentally to cook your food and keep warm, and you invent snares to catch small prey and throwing devices to kill prey at a distance. If you had been the biggest strongest species around, there would have been no need to invent weapons, or tools, or much in the way of strategy and tactics.

This is not to deny that necessity is also the mother of invention. Invention has two mothers. Probably more. Necessity is also the mother of evolution; when we lived in trees, it was necessary to be able to hold on to the branches, so those who survived were those who evolved to have opposable thumbs, and without opposable thumbs we would have had a much harder time inventing weapons, or much of anything else. Once supplied with an erect posture and opposable thumbs, we were able to invent work-arounds to compensate for our many weaknesses.

Farther along the human timeline, when population pressures or changing climate or just the curiosity that goes along with inventive minds drove us from the warm regions of our origin to colder, harsher environments, we figured out how to compensate for the weakness of our bodies when it came to keeping warm by wrapping ourselves in the skins of animals we’d killed, and later with woven fibers from plants. If we hadn’t compensated like this evolution might have eventually restored our ability to grow enough warm fur of our own, but then again it might not.

Of course the more we compensated for our weaknesses the stronger we became, in terms of survival. We learned to grow and breed our food, to irrigate our crops, to produce and save enough food and other resources to be able to diversify our work, so that some people didn’t have to produce their own food but could trade their crafted goods or various skills for what they needed. Some people needed physical strength for farming, hunting, protecting the resources their communities had amassed, but other people could make their living in ways that depended more on mental strength than on physical. Eventually some people could be weak in every way, but survive due to the resources of their families. Survival of the fittest wasn’t what it used to be, but neither was the environment one needed to survive in.

These days strength of one sort or another is still valued, and weakness despised, but oddly valued at the same time if it makes the despiser feel more powerful. Let’s not get into the labyrinth of gender relationships in this regard, except to note that men who seem to appear weak get the most disrespect. Women who seem to appear stronger than culturally approved get disrespect, too, and resentment, but at least in recent times they’ve been able to get away with wearing clothing similar to men’s in ways that men can’t manage the other way around.

The more complex our society gets, though, and the more important technology becomes, the more valuable inventiveness becomes, and the less necessary physical strength turns out to be. That ninety pound weakling on the beach might get sand kicked in his face by the muscular brute eyeing his girlfriend, but he may well own a tech start-up that pays him enough to buy lawyers who can flatten the muscle man. (Sorry, youngsters, for using a metaphor from old magazine ads that was already passé before you were born.) And that rich techie may well have his youthful nerdiness to thank for motivating him to study and create and compensate for his own perceived weakness. Strength gets redefined, and so does the fitness to survive.

Am I grasping at straws to handle this time’s theme of “weakness?” You bet. Just be glad you avoided my real thoughts on the subject, all of which have been focused lately on the weaknesses that come with aging. Not my own, except by unavoidable extrapolation, but those of my once strong, handsome, intelligent, and compassionate father, who, at ninety-five, is still compassionate, but needing more and more help, and feeling guilty to be needing it, however much my brothers and I assure him, truthfully, that he’s earned every bit as much help as we (mostly me, for valid reasons) can give him.

So you can see why I chose to take the long, long view of weakness as a benefit in the development of our species, rather than get up close and personal. Also, social media addiction and general procrastination have already been covered pretty well, so there’s no need for me to go there. Thank goodness.